Jesus is supposed to be the ultimate being. To the point where Christians have interesting ideas like Jesus re-creating the universe every moment, without which all would cease to exist. However, Christian theology treats two principles as higher than Jesus. Logic, and existence itself.

Jesus cannot instantiate a logical contradiction. Similarly, Jesus’ properties are supposedly subject to logical inquiry. Jesus not only does obey, but must obey logic.

Christians feel the need to reject proofs of Jesus’ non-existence. Again, not only is Jesus subject to logical proof, he must exist to be meaningful.

Logic is itself subject to the principle of existence.

One of the ways to see religion is about assigning the highest social status to the highest power. The highest power is the principle of existence.

In Lesser Bull’s terms, I’m not sure what submitting to existence would be exactly, but you can submit to logic. Christianity almost did this: they seem to have forgotten that Jesus is supposed to also be Logos.

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There’s a different elevator pitch, which I believe gets to the same place, about taking consciousness seriously and on its own terms.

Is Reality conscious? Well, are you part of reality? Are you conscious? Reality is conscious, QED. Whether it also has its own gestalt consciousness is a good question. Let’s check.

Step one: pray to Reality and see if you get an answer.

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There’s a third elevator pitch about meta-religion.

My faith is that we can go check. That we can learn how to learn about spirituality.

It seems to me that since scientists are so pleased to mark themselves anti-religion, nobody has done the obvious thing of treating religions like hypotheses.

Some scientists mark off religion as orthogonal to science. Sorry, but existence acknowledges no such boundaries. Either a thing is or it isn’t.

The idea that the Bible is entirely true is clearly ridiculous. (But then, it seems that part of the point of religion is believing things that look entirely ridiculous to non-believers.) However, it is probably true at about the same order as Aristotlean physics – that is, not entirely false or metaphorical or what have you.

All these ancient peoples are clearly observing something. The questions are: what? How can we use it? Can we talk to it? If all major religions are the spiritual equivalent of Aristotlean physics, they will all have bits and pieces of truth. What would we get if we combined all these truths? Of course, first we have to learn to tell the difference.

Parapsychology is indeed pseudoscience, because it never tests theories. It tests theory-free predictions, which is frankly crap. For example, if ESP is asking Jesus what symbol is on the card, Jesus isn’t going to blindly tell you it is three squiggles. Jesus has his own mind; he’s going to realize it is a contrived experiment, with no real consequences, and won’t bother himself with it.

I’m not saying I believe in ESP. Or reincarnation. I’m saying it’s possible to check, and it hasn’t been done. Either you’re a scientist and incapable of taking it seriously, or you’re a believer and feel no need to verify.

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My next strategy is to hand a toy version to someone, and then tweak it until they find it spiritually satisfying. I have no idea what makes a thing spiritually satisfying, especially for not-me. Ideally, do this for a few people and see what if what I end up tweaking it into makes any kind of sense. If it does, expand the toy version. If it doesn’t, fix the problem.

I will add that Aristotle’s physics may not have been ultimately correct, but it was proximately correct. Hippocrates’ medicine wasn’t very good, but I understand it wasn’t worse than nothing. The heart is not the seat of emotion, but a seat of emotion does exist. Burning things in fact do emit something, it’s just more esoteric than phlogiston. In other words, ancient people were not stupid, no matter how easy it is to forget that in modern times. However, they weren’t often particular correct, either.

Do you have any reason to think this pattern shouldn’t extend to religion?

Religion gets much, if not all, of its effect from the sense of submission. I doubt that a designed religion can quite achieve that same effect. Liberalism is a long exercise is trying to submit to oneself, and it hasn’t panned out so well.

Everybody cherry picks, and a non-retarded person with a non-evil doctor (a vast majority) is clearly better off today using medicine than without using it. I say that as a victim of medical errors. They didn’t kill me, and prayer would have been worse.

Most medical errors today aren’t harmful to your health, just to your wallet. Average lifespan is in the damn 80s for Christ’s sake.

Of smart people, not for. Realistically, the ‘scientific’ elements make it less believable and more obviously silly as a religion. You don’t enhance the wizard of Oz by focusing on the man behind the curtain.

@Alrenous None of these are very good. You are treating the mythical and allegorical aspects as though they were structural. This is like a religion remix, not a new song. I’m not sure, but you might enjoy reading “All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age,” by Dreyfus and Kelly. This book will help you to create a more effective new religious movement. It explains how Jesus works as an intermediary between Gnon and human beings.

You’re being too generous to medicine as an institution. Doctors didn’t introduce the idea of sewerage infrastructure or running water. The pharma industry combined with free markets and caveat emptor could easily cut 80% of modern medicine out of the loop, with zero negative consequences (at worst).

People used to die of any stupid infection, a quarter of babies died before 5 years old just a century ago. As stupid as much of modern medicine is, it’s not worse than praying for crying out loud. It might be worse than having a healthy diet and avoiding drugs and shady women, but that’s not the doctors fault now, is it?

If you try to group any human endeavour by “institutions”, you’re gonna reach the conclusion that everything sucks and is worse than praying. Surely education is worse than praying if you think of education as the state racket that it is, but that doesn’t mean we should stop teaching kids to read, does it?

I’m not pushing the praying angle of this argument with any particular vigor. My only point is that ‘medicine’ is a largely fake totality, promoted by a self-congratulating interest group that seeks to claim for itself all the positive health benefits of social modernization. Once ‘doctors’ become state apparatchiks, a syndrome that might have been merely cute becomes extremely toxic. (Yes, it is the same in essence as state educational agencies attributing each and every advance in learning to their activities and budgets, which is equally false.) If this fraud complex makes people want to start praying, I guess that’s up to them …

This sets up a rhetorical trap. Any examples I try to marshal in favor of the capability of modern medicine (itself more of a technology of other sciences plus a social science) you will just allocate to your ‘20%’ as retort. Are we counting by expenditure, time, techniques, lives saved, QALY’s saved, QALY’s / Public Funds overall efficiency, etc. ?

Let me use blunt trauma injuries as a particular way to expose revealed preferences. Perhaps one parent in ten million thinks, when they’re son gets in a car or sports (or war) accident resulting in bleeding and broken bones, that they’d be at least as well off not getting the immediate attention of paramedics, stabilized with a host of sanitized and validated drugs, devices, and techniques, shuffled to an emergency room, treated by surgeons, and have their bones set with plaster or pins or even replaced – with antibiotics thrown in to prevent opportunistic (from the scene) or Iatrogenic (from other ill people in the care facility) infection.

Emergency medicine, in particular, has made measurably great strides in the past few decades – which is part of why both the ‘homicide rate’ and ‘battle fatality per potentially-fatal incident rate’ have declined so markedly (thwarting various attempts at time-series analysis).

Implicit in this discussion seems to be a strange linguistic nomonym where ‘Medicine’ means both the ‘good, obviously beneficial medicine I’d always unhesitatingly use’ and the ‘bad, ineffective medicine that doesn’t really know how to cure the uncertain cause of this particular symptom’.

So, is it just so that we can believe in (some) medicine and bitch about (some) medicine at the same time without needing to be more specific?

The only argument-resolving specificity comes from markets (revealed preferences). As long as the state has medicine in a death-grip, so that all evidence about what people really want is rendered inaccessible, then cantankerous non-persuasive disputes is all we have.

Handle Reply:August 25th, 2013 at 1:51 am

“all evidence about what people really want is rendered inaccessible, then cantankerous non-persuasive disputes is all we have.”

Actually is the for profit doctors that have the incentive to have you believe you’re dying unless you do something *right soon*. What the nationalization of medicine has done is try to not treat people. Isn’t the NSA killing a third of old people who get surgery?

I know a 93 years old man who just spent 50k dollars getting heart surgery in Japan. That’s what private medicine does to you. But hey, the guy’s happy. Should see him drive his car to the grocery store every morning.

Really, of all the evil institutions out there, medicine isn’t the worst one. If we hated journalists half as much as we hate doctors the world would be a better place.

I’m all for rich people spending their own money on extravagant private medical solutions, because that builds a real market, and moves things forward. My problem is entirely with entrenched tax-funded special interests promoting the indispensable importance of their ‘solutions’ in the complete absence of supporting evidence.

My problem is entirely with entrenched tax-funded special interests promoting the indispensable importance of their ‘solutions’ in the complete absence of supporting evidence.

As long as ‘medicine’ or ‘doctors’ is your shorthand for ^^ that practice, then of course you’re absolutely right. And I think your other suggestion is equally correct: first-world standards of health/longevity have more to do with the benefits of modernization as a more general system of practices rather than with the existence of doctors. That being said, who would you like treating your family: a Namibian witch doctor, a Civil War-era surgeon, a well-meaning physician working before the discovery of penicillin, or a contemporary graduate of UCLA or Oxford medical school?

Once globalized markets for professional medical services mature, which they will — driven by out-of-control cost dynamics in Western countries — I expect competent Asian health care options to prove attractive. They combine the best of Western capability with a minimum of special-interest hubris.